Last year's cyber attacks that brought internet traffic to a standstill in Georgia were carried out by civilians and Russian crime gangs, in some cases with the unwitting help of websites and software companies located in the US, according to researchers.

People appealing against rulings by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) will face a new tribunal structure from January next year. The Information Tribunal, which hears appeals on ICO rulings, will become part of a wider system.

Nearly four in ten companies have staff whose main job is to monitor the outgoing email of colleagues, according to US data security research. More than a third of the companies surveyed hired staff to perform only that monitoring function.

CommentThe term REST keeps on popping up when vendors and analysts talk about cloud storage. We're told that RESTful interfaces are more advanced than traditional filer interfaces such as NFS or CIFS. What is REST all about? Let's take a fairly simplistic look at REST, cast an eye in the direction of its advantages over the traditional NAS protocols, and try an overview comparison with Microsoft's SOAP protocol.

Australian Federal police have been humbled after boasting of taking over an underground cybercrime forum - only for hackers to break into a federal police computer system, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.

A Canadian infectious-diseases boffin has published an authoritative mathematical model of zombie plagues. He concludes that the only scenario in which our civilisation could survive a zombie outbreak is one in which normal humans react immediately using extreme violence against the undead, without any attempt to cure or quarantine them.

ReviewIntel was the first company to deliver a Sata SSD, its 80GB X25-M, and we were blown away by the combination of speed and silence. Unfortunately, the price was rather steep but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.

NASA boffins say that they have identified an amino acid, one of the key building blocks of Earth-style life, in material recovered from a comet far out in space. They say this supports the idea that life may be commonly found throughout the universe, and that they have eliminated the chance that the cometary sample has been contaminated by Earthly life.

Round up Week 3What's an operating system anyway? The questions we posed this week were quite disconnected, but they inspired similar perspectives from the comments. Not least, respondents to the first article sought to address what exactly was an operating system. Graham Bartlett summed it up perhaps, by saying:

A new online initiative designed to crack down on shoplifters could be set to rebound badly on the retail chain pioneering it - and police advice on the law in matters of surveillance may yet again prove to be more optimistic than accurate.

The government is still mulling the possibility of bringing in a 50p a month stealth tax on fixed phone lines to fund next-gen broadband, despite Treasury minister Stephen Timms hinting that those plans could be shelved during election year.

One of the problems with distributed systems (which was not much of an issue when a company had one mainframe or midrange box a few decades ago) is keeping track of who uses what IT resources so the cost of that processing can be pinned on the users and not the company in general.

Adobe Systems has released updates that patch vulnerabilities in two widely used web development applications, several of which let attackers steal sensitive data or take complete control of users' machines.

A Missouri woman has become the first person to be charged with felony cyberbullying in that state after she allegedly posted photos and personal information of a teenage girl to the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist.